


Time Makes Strangers of Us All

by Duck_Life



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-22
Updated: 2016-07-22
Packaged: 2018-07-26 01:46:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7555339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duck_Life/pseuds/Duck_Life
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bishop and Jubilee through the years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time Makes Strangers of Us All

I.

It’s a little jarring to be told suddenly by some stranger that you are “the last of the X-Men.” Still, Jubilee waits a week or so before broaching the topic with Bishop. Y’know. She doesn’t want to look too eager.

“So,” she says to him across the kitchen counter over their bowls of Oreo O’s, “Last of the X-Men, huh?” She’s trying to play it cool but her hands are shaking.

He squints at her, like he’s trying to process what she just said. Bishop is a huge man, and he makes the spoon in his hand look hilariously tiny. “Look, Jubilation,” he says, “I’m a little new to the… time travel… thing. But one thing I do know is that I’m really not supposed to tell you too much about your own future.”

“Ohh, okay, totally understand,” she says, nodding rapidly. “Uh-huh, got it, reading ya loud and clear.” She coughs. “So, like, what do you mean by _last_? Do they all die? Do we just not need the X-Men anymore?”

“Jubilation.”

“No, okay, I’ll drop it,” she says. She looks down at her cereal and then back up at him. “What do I look like as an old lady?”

“ _Jubilation_.”

“Okay, okay.”

II.

When she rollerblades smack into him, Jubilee thinks Bishop’s going to be mad, but he just smiles—maybe the first time she’s seen him smile— and asks where he can get a pair.

Apparently they don’t have rollerblading in the future, and Jubilee finally knows more about something than Bishop does. He looks like a baby fawn struggling down the hall— a gigantic baby fawn.

“I’m— I’m going to fall,” he admits, clinging to the wall as he makes his way toward her.

“Yeah,” she says, bobbing her head. “Yeah, you _are_ gonna fall. So just stop worrying and let it happen, and then you’ll be over it.”

It’s not until years later that she remembers telling Bish that, that she realizes it makes pretty decent life advice.

She was just trying to teach him how to rollerblade.

III.

Jubilee’s been told many times, in every possible way, that she can’t know anything about her own future.

So she fixates on the operative phrase— “her own.” It becomes her new hobby to pester him with general questions about the time he came from.

“What music do people listen to in the future?” she says, tailing him as he prunes the hedges around the fountain. “Who’s President of the United States? How does Britney Spears die?”

Bishop sighs. “Techno ska,” he tells her. “No one because they dismantled that system of government, and who says she does?”

Jubilee stands there, fascinated. She knows that 99 percent of what he’s telling her is bullshit— as evidenced by the mischievous glint in his eye— but she’s intrigued by that 1 percent nugget of truth.

Asking Bishop minute, trivial details about the world he comes from is the only way to get him to open up at all, it turns out. He won’t tell her about her future and he won’t tell her about his past.

“It was bad,” he sums up one night while they’re making s’mores in the microwave. “Bounced between homelessness and a mutant camp. Kind of a rock and a hard place situation.”

Jubilee picks sticky melted marshmallow off of her fingers and asks him if bald eagles go extinct.

IV.

It’s years later when they meet by chance in what used to be Mutant Town, stumbling into each other in an innocuous grocery store. “Oh,” Jubilee says, for once in her life at a loss for words. “Um. Hi.”

“Jubilation,” he says, and he looks so different, still larger than life but cramped somehow, like he’s hunched completely inward. The years hang on him.

“Wow, I haven’t seen you since—”

“Since I was trying to murder a child,” he supplies. His eyes look gray. He seems… not at peace with his past sins, but quieted with them. Finished. “I’m so—”

“Hey, let’s,” she says, stopping him not so much because she totally absolves him but because she wants to avoid a weird emotional scene. “It’s okay, Bish. Everything turned out… well, horrible, really.”

“Yeah,” he says, and exhales. He hugs her awkwardly, being careful not to crush the carton of eggs in his hand. “How are you?”

“Vampire,” she says. “Mom.” And she’s wondering why he seems more surprised about the latter than the former.

“I’m proud of you,” he tells her, sort of out of nowhere.

It fits, though.

V.

She finds the kid wandering the streets, tugging his sister along by the hand. Jumps at every noise, never turns a corner without peeking around it at least twice.

Jubilee can’t help but remember a young girl alone at the mall, fending for herself and trading fireworks for food.

“Lucas,” she says, holding her hands out, palms flat. It’s hard to be a mutant _and_ a vampire and not look like a threat these days, but she tries. He jumps anyway, standing tall and protective in front of his sister. It’s so weird, she thinks. Looking _down_ at him. “It’s okay. You can trust me,” she says, and then remembers he’s got no reason to. “I’m an X-Man.”

It’s still true, she decides. Once an X-Man, always an X-Man. Even if there are no more X-Men. Even if it’s just you alone.

“They’re gone,” he says, but she can tell he wants to believe her. “They’re all gone.”

“Well, I’m a vampire,” she says nonchalantly, flashing her fangs. “I’m a little more resilient than…” She trails off, not wanting to think about her friends. Her family. Everything that’s 80 years behind her. “Look, kid, you want food? A place to sleep? Come on.”

In the end, he follows her.

“How did you know my name?” he asks her as they round a corner.

“Lucky guess,” she lies, not looking back at him.

She’s really not supposed to tell him too much about his own future.


End file.
